Check out the latest post in Gordon Belt’s series on the memory of John Sevier, in which he examines the work of James R. Gilmore, the nineteenth-century writer who did for Sevier what Parson Weems did for George Washington.

I read Gilmore’s stuff on Sevier when I was working on my master’s thesis. He’s a great example of the hagiographic tendencies of nineteenth-century historical writers. You get the impression from his books that he believed Sevier’s riflemen could have won the entire Revolution by themselves if everybody else had gotten out of their way.